First day for headscarves in Turkish universities has spotty results

One of the agents of Turkey’s cultural transformation stood 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds at the gate of Bilgi University on Monday...

One of the agents of Turkey’s cultural transformation stood 5 feet tall and less than 100 pounds at the gate of Bilgi University on Monday, wearing a fuzzy purple winter coat, brown hiking boots, and a black wool scarf wrapped around her head.

Sabiha Gimen, a 21-year-old student of international trade, had risen at 5 am, determined to wear a head scarf to campus but uncertain just how she should tie it. She searched for a way to accommodate both Turkey’s newly eased restrictions on women’s head coverings and her own lasting outrage at the government telling her what she could wear on her head.

“We’ve been fighting this issue for years,” said Gimen, who defines herself as a strongly religious Muslim and a feminist.

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Monday was the first day of classes since Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, a member of the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party, signed into law on Friday a constitutional amendment lifting a ban on headscarves in public universities. In a bow to the secular principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, Gul’s administration stipulated that women still only could wear onto campus scarves that were tied in bows under their chins.

Turks regard that style as traditional, in contrast to Islamic styles that cover a woman’s hair and neck completely, as some Muslims believe their religion prescribes.

Neither Gimen nor anyone else was sure whether universities would yet allow any headscarves at all. Ataturk’s political party, the strongly secular Republican People’s Party, had pledged court challenges to keep women who cover their heads forever out of public buildings. Politicians and higher-education officials debated over the weekend whether the amendment should be honored.

“These women are being used by the fundamentalist movement,” Nur Serter, a Republican People’s Party member of parliament, and a professor at Istanbul University, said in an interview. “I believe the majority of Turkey is still secular, and determined not to yield any ground.”

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Standing in her home, Gimen considered tying the scarf “granny style”, she said later on Monday— knotting the ends under her chin in a bow. That way was most likely to get her past guards at her university. But that way also smacked to her of what she saw as decades of compromise and weakness by Muslims in Turkey.

Gimen, who considers the current government too weak on Islam, settled for letting the ends trail, unbowed, around her neck. She spent the last minutes before class calling friends who would join her on the front line Monday of Turkey’s head scarf battles.